crooked wheels keep turning
by Agent of the Apothecary
Summary: Post-finale. Eventually, she learns to grow into the Chloe-shaped hole that had been left behind by pressure and expectation and love, always love.


**Story:** crooked wheels keep turning

**Summary:** Post-finale. Eventually, she learns to grow into the Chloe-shaped hole that had been left behind by pressure and expectation and love (always love).

**Notes:** Because I am tired of writing a depressing Chloe story. And she needs to be back on track and kick some major goddamn ass. This is how the summer should go.

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Smallville_ or the Killers. Despite all desperate wishing to the contrary.

* * *

What is the theory behind doing everything for no one?

Because—Clark is gone and lost and a bit of dust and rolling windmills and every sad back she's seen walking away in a spaghetti western—Jimmy is far away and smiling impersonally and hanging around his brother's neck from the cracked leather strap—Davis is bright and shattered like her mother and always hovering as a little voice at her shoulder, reminding her that she was his broken world, his leash, his life, his death—and

There's no one left.

* * *

She builds the apartment from the bottom upwards, literally, starting with buckets of foaming bleach over the bloody stain in the center and moving so that she is clinging to the stained glass windows in a decidedly unsafe fashion, scrubbing at the wisps caught between the panes.

The movers she hires because she sees their sign along the road that she drives between Metropolis and Smallville. _Weston Movers: Help Make Your New House Something Better_. The pair of men who show up on the front stoop of the Talon are thick around the middle and move like crabs in a sideways scuttle, but they load up her furniture and Jimmy's furniture and bits of Lois's furniture that she has forgotten lying around, and they transport it with minimal fuss and zero breakage.

The first box she unpacks is the coffeemaker, and the second is her computer's life support system. She untangles cords and cables and external hard drives and second (third, fourth, fifth) monitors as her first cup of New Metropolis Resident coffee hisses and bubbles in the pot. She decides to leave everything where she unpacks it, in the middle of the room, because she has tried hiding her life under the rushes and all that did was kill her fiancée and alienate her best friend, and she's decided she is going to go solo for a while.

* * *

The first person Chloe helps from her new watchtower is her downstairs neighbor, who fries her coffeemaker when she forces the prongs of the plug in the wrong holes. Chloe brings her cups every morning for a week until she can get another machine.

The second person Chloe helps is an almost-victim of rape, when she slams her (vital, life-giving, information-bearing) laptop onto the head of the woman's attacker. She is left holding the separate pieces of her computer, wondering at how she is going to explain to Ollie where his mission specs went, when she realizes that the woman is crying, clinging to Chloe's knees, sobbing and crying aloud in a bungled mesh of consonants. She peels the woman away from her legs and calls the police, before gently leading the woman to a nearby bench under a seedy light. She waits until she hears sirens before she leaves.

She is more concerned about her laptop than the woman, because bits of Chloe in the back of her mind are going _she'll be fine, they're always fine_, and that should worry her more than it does.

* * *

The boys bring life to the watchtower, but sometimes Chloe prefers it empty and dark, when the light comes from the blinking lights on her monitors and reflect off the shiny plastic of the pushpins she still uses. They draw smiley faces on the articles on her newly spreading Wall of Weird (there is a little carrot between 'of' and 'weird,' where Bart scribbled 'Superhero' in crooked handwriting above the rest) and drink all of her milk and make noise about buying her a dog.

Sometimes one of them mentions that they think she is working too hard, but suggestions usually fade before negligence, and Chloe is tired of being fallible and being wrong and she just wants to work, all the time. When she isn't working, she is asleep, either sprawled across her couch with take-out curry balanced on her stomach or in her bathtub, which is porcelain and has huge brass feet that curve out over the tiles of the floor. The couch reminds her of late-night research fests with Clark speeding out for dinner. Jimmy bought her the tub.

* * *

A lot of Chloe Sullivan is made up of bits and pieces of the men she has (does) love(d), and having them gone suddenly is like losing parts of her she never even knew. She's become a shell in their absence, and being Watchtower suddenly becomes more than just a second life/part time job/full time nuisance. Chloe Sullivan becomes Watchtower because she isn't sure what else she is, and maybe that would scare her if she understood it a little better.

Over the course of the summer, she looks for Lois and ignores Clark. Maybe a bit of her expects him to come crawling back eventually, a bright and triumphant figure in blue and red, ready for her forgiveness and the second beginning of their friendship. (He doesn't).

She never stops looking for Lois, but after a while she doesn't know where to look anymore, and Clark, the last person to ever see her, is not only unhelpful but borderline rude. She sends Oliver for information that she knows Clark won't give her, but he comes back with three bruised knuckles and a surly expression hovering at the corner of his mouth.

"He doesn't know anything," he tells her. "Sorry."

"So am I," she says, and gets ice for his knuckles from the kitchen.

* * *

Without Lex around to constantly be five steps ahead of them, they start making serious headway on denting the number of 33.1 facilities. Chloe and Oliver develop a mutually beneficient relationship: he stops trying to beat up Clark, and she doesn't tell him that she knows about the hours he spends skulking around Tess Mercer.

When she is Watchtower, a lot of that—secrets, lies, For The Greater Good—gets blurred out by static and heat signatures and the tap of her fingers on computer keys. Some days she misses her super brain with almost tragic fondness; usually she's too busy to miss anything other than sleep. To keep people from asking too many questions, she calls in the _Planet_ and says Lois is on a sabatical; she ghostwrites weekly articles and actively attempts to copy her cousin's style.

After a while, people stop looking for Lois and Chloe stops trying so hard.

* * *

Oliver spends less time with Tess Mercer when the woman's security quadruples—Chloe works intensely for a week trying to figure out why, and when she gets slammed in the face with a host of Kryptonian symbols on a monitor inside Luthor mansion, she childishly emails the necessary info to Clark and lets it go—and Chloe would be glad for the company except she has fourteen millions things to do, and babysit a bored billionaire is not one of them. She sends him on a Justice League fact-checking mission in Gotham, and he sends her funny texts about Bruce Wayne's hygiene habits during the entire trip. Eventually he stops regailing her with prep school stories and starts in on the local capes.

_Am thinking about inviting Batman to join JL_, is the last one she gets.

_Twenty bucks says he won't accept_, she sends back, and when Oliver comes back from his trip looking frustrated and with a hefty snowglobe of the Gotham skyline that _cannot_ be worth twenty dollars, she feels a bit of her usual (old) elation.

"Told you," she says mildly, and he plunges both of his hands into her hair and musses with it until she has a little mini-cyclone whirling around her head. "Ack!" she cries and chases him around the apartment with a rubber spatula until they both give up and collapse onto the couch lying in a forgotten corner of the main room. She catches him watching her warily, and it pisses her off so suddenly that the anger is a flood of adrenaline through her body.

"I am not made of china, Queen," she says. "Now get the hell out of my tower, I've got work to do."

* * *

Oliver sends her roses the next morning. She feeds them to her dishwasher, and buys herself a pair of heels because she feels like herself so violently and perfectly that she can't suffer sitting in the watchtower for very long.

She prowls through the Talon until the girls want to throttle her, and she breezes through the next two of Lois' articles with such minimal effor that it's like skimming air, and even as she acknowledges that the feeling can't last, she revels.

* * *

"Hi, boys," she greets them when she floats into the clocktower. "What's on our plate for today?"

"How about taking Chloe off the happy pills? They're really creepy," suggests Bart, and she just half-laughs at him and gives Victor a kiss on the cheek and dances her way past AC, feeling like a total HBIC in her new heels. She knows her legs look nice because Oliver gives her a purposeful leer.

"I forgive you," she tells him, and pulls at a fistful of his hair just to screw with him.

"For what?" Bart wails plaintively as she takes out her laptop and logs on.

"Nothing," she and Oliver say together, and her laugh echoes so clearly through the clocktower that she is breathless for a second, and she thinks, _this, this is the happiness I haven't felt in years_, and her head feels light and clear, like water. So she laughs again.

* * *

The next morning, Chloe throttles the engine on the search for Lois, calling in a couple favors and visiting John Jones at the Met PD building for lunch. She buys daisies for Jimmy and lilies for Davis and takes an afternoon to leave them for both her boys. As for the third one—she wraps up _Tales of the Weird and Unexplained_ and leaves it out on her balcony. (It's gone the next morning, when she checks.)

* * *

"Watchtower is on," she says, and the little Green Arrow figure at the bottom of the screen gives the security camera footage a salute.

"Welcome back," he says.

* * *

_So, short but (tolerably) sweet, I guess. Thoughts?_


End file.
